“A new bill backed by movie studios and other large copyright holders takes a novel approach to curbing access to piratical Web sites: an Internet death penalty. That’s a good way to describe the approach adopted by the legislation introduced today, which specifies a step-by-step method for making Web sites suspected of infringing copyrights or trademarks vanish from the Internet. It’s called the Protect IP Act. The U.S. Department of Justice would receive the power to seek a court order against an allegedly infringing Web site, and then serve that order on search engines, certain Domain Name System providers, and Internet advertising firms – which would in turn be required to ‘expeditiously’ make the target Web site invisible.” …because the interests of big content are obviously far more important than socialist communist terrorist nonsense like freedom of speech, right to a fair trial, innocent until proven otherwise, and so on. This is exactly what the founding fathers had in mind. Honest.
Such fun, the government can order unrelated companies to play whack a mole on an international scale!
At what point do we realize that these government paid policing activities being lobbied for by the entertainment industry cost more than they are paying taxes? It is cheaper to just let everyone copy things and send the entertainment execs pension checks from Uncle Sam.
If this keeps up the cost of policing their broken business model is going to exceed the revenue of the industry. The government is an idiot for bearing the costs of policing someone else’s broken business model.
Let’s pass a law saying that I own all of the air. Then send government thugs everywhere to collect my royalties!
That’s been the case for ages already, there’s a reason the term “Hollywood accounting” exists.
“Let’s pass a law saying that I own all of the air. Then send government thugs everywhere to collect my royalties!”
guarantee you that’s in the works. They’ll start with water and eventually do air as well.
Careful Thom or you’ll get sent to room 101.
Someone needs to explain to Congress exactly how the DNS system works, how Apache VirtualHosting works, how search engines work, etc, to show them just how stupid of an idea this is.
This is like asking for the ability to stop pedestrian access to “Cool Cafe”, whereby by-laws go to the business and take down the “Cool Cafe” sign above the door. So the business sticks up “Even Cooler Cafe” sign, and business carries on as usual. Until by-laws takes down that sign. And a new one goes up.
It’s not stopping business. It’s not closing the business. It’s not even affecting the business for more than a few minutes at most.
Whack-a-mole doesn’t even begin to cover it.
Edited 2011-05-13 17:56 UTC
Yesterday I had a conversation with my father about this type of thing. He told me that the founding fathers probably wouldn’t have given us so much freedom if they had access to advanced technology like the internet.
He’s pretty liberal by US standards. So when the general population doesn’t even believe in freedom, I really am not surprised by this…
I hate to say but your father doesn’t sound to be very versed on the various ideologies of the U.S. founding fathers.
They ranged across the board, naturally, however the winning ideology was that of preventing freedoms in government by enforcing freedoms of the peoples.
This is not the same as it is today, due to the civil war, however. The idea of the times was that each state was independent, but bound in a common cause through a highly restricted union.
The Bill of Rights is not a list of what people can do, it is a list of what the FEDERAL government can / can’t do. States are bound by their own constitutions, but not the bill of rights.
This is why elected federal officials are not drug tested: it is illegal for the federal government to perform drug testing. ( Yes, if you are a federal employee, you can try and fight your drug testing – do the research! ).
Business can drug test because they are not bound by these restrictions, though I believe they should.
Anyway, back into the freedom thing…
The idea of enforcing personal liberty was to encourage free thought and expression by creating a perfectly safe environment. If the people have the means to express themselves and explore the truth, they will be more able to function in a democratic process. They will also be more willing to fight to protect those freedoms.
Today we take what we have for granted, and as such are losing what we have had one step at a time. The founding fathers knew this would happen and so did the best they could to create a government which was highly inefficient at passing laws. The consequence was that the nation would be slow to respond to a crises, and so you needed some way to provide quick responses without the negative effects of those decisions being made by a bunch of idiots.
Thus the need for a powerful leader became evident, but was a tough thing to accept given the state of affairs. Finally, it was decided we would have a weak leader most of the time, unable to affect change without going through many layers of red tape, but that the leader would be able to command the Armed Forces at all times, but that the Armed Forces would be separated from the office of the president and permitted to utilize both the judiciary and legislative branches of government to deny the president his orders. Thus an extremely powerful leader, but one with many checks and balances.
The idea then spread to including these checks through-out the government, meaning the executive branch, the judicial branch, and the legislative branches could all disagree and fight it out.
The biggest failing point is in the judicial branch, with the Supreme Court. Life-long membership, appointed by the president, with senate confirmation as the only requirement.
Seriously, these should be elected offices. These people have the most power of any people in the government. Nine people hold all the power of the judicial branch and can re-interpret the law virtually however they see fit.
8 years in office, then replace them. Possible to be re-elected twice.
Also need term limits for senators and congressmen. I say allow 12 years total. That is a long time, but we need to stop this career politician crap right now!
Hmm… ramble ramble…
–The loon
FYI, most of what you’ve written is factually incorrect. I don’t have time to correct everything, but I’ll pick a few whoppers…
The Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution flat out says “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.” In other words, the US Constitution is the supreme law of the land and it trumps state law. If you’d like specifics directly from the Founding Father’s mouths, read the Federalist Papers. James Madison was outspoken of his support for a strong federal government. The Civil War didn’t change anything except show that a President was willing to use the full force of the US military to ensure that states lived up to their constitutional obligations. Secession is 100% unconstitutional.
The Incorporation Doctrine, brought about by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment has made the Bill of Rights apply to the state governments.
The United States Military is fully under the Executive Branch of the Government. The Secretary of Defense is a cabinet level position. The President is the Commander in Chief and the military has, effectively, no ability to disobey his orders. If military leaders don’t want to do what the president commands, he is perfectly within his rights to fire and replace them. The only real powers Congress has over the military is budgetary and passing an Act of War (which to be fair are very strong powers, but besides saying you can or can’t go to war and how much you can spend, they cannot dictate how the military conducts the war). The Judicial branch has virtually no power over the military, the military even has it’s own internal judicial system.
The Founding Father’s did not want to make the Supreme Court disposed to listen to the whims of the people. By making appointments for life, justices can make their own decisions with no fear of losing an election because of a disliked decision.
In short US constitution outlines 3 types of authority:
President – the simple majority authority
Congress – authority of groups of people
Supreme Court – legal scholar authority
One flaw of the US constitution is no process of repealing a law.
There are actually 2 processes by which a law can, more or less, be repealed. The first is the Supreme Court can rule that a law is unconstitutional. The second is Congress can either pass a new law which says “the old law is not valid anymore” or they can pass a new law which amends the old law to say something different. Neither of those is, strictly speaking, “repealing” a law, but both of them result in the same effect as a law being repealed.
Well… Technically unconstitutional law is still in effect, it just can’t be enforced.
At least, that is what my professor(PhD in law) and a friend constitutional scholar tell me.
Edited 2011-05-15 02:30 UTC
Thank you for reminding me about incorporation, my mind seemed to completely forget that over the years since this information was last utilized…
For the rest, however, I failed miserably to maintain the distinction between prevalent ideology and the conflict between the law and constitutional forgings.
Two separate issues altogether. I was speaking of prevalent ideologies in regards to the founding fathers, not what they ultimately agreed upon. I have read the personal works of many of these men, with more focus on Washington & Jefferson than they truly deserve.
Jefferson’s ideology stands out in particular with my comment as it feeds into the personal freedom topic at hand.
The national ideology at the formation of the union was that of state equality or even supremacy in regards to the union government, hence the civil war itself – the Union victory causing a drift in national ideologies.
Sorry for the confusion, I was and remain fairly well aware of the constitution ( haven’t studied it in soooo long… ). History was one of my strongest suites in school, taking the highest honors… hah.. how time mangles the brain!
Anyway, re-reading my comment I feel I was overly insulting, so I must apologize in that regard. I attempted against such, yet failed.
–The loon
So they’re wanting to remove these types of sites from the internet? No, what they’re really going to achive is pretty much nothing, and at most they’re just going to push more people into the underground dark side of the internet that is pretty much hidden from view from the vast majority of the ‘internet’ as they see it.
We’ve already seen dht being used to side step the need for things like torrent trackers, when people start looking for otherways, and word will get around eventually we’ll have floods of users with tor, nok access etc.
Pedopornographers will love that if normal people are pushed into using the same kind of tools they’re probably already using to hide their activities; it will get a lot harder to detect them.
You know what, I’ve heard exactly this from french cops during the HADOPI debate.
Basically, they said : “Currently, when we see encrypted data, we jump on it right away because we know it’s suspicious. Tomorrow, that encrypted stream will be a song from Lady Gaga. This will make real criminals significantly harder to detect.”
…we have the digital laws Hadopi and Loppsi that just do that
Welcome in the land of freedom of speech, liberties, whatever ! New year is presidential election, imagine the site of an opponent located, magic, on the server of a pirate site (that might have poped from nowhere just in time) and the judge just decide to take the server down altogether, including the opponent website :/ Imagine the rest…
Kochise
What will the poor movie and music thieves do now?
Hopefully places like Europe will still embrace stolen products and allow people to steal stuff over the internet.
This has been said an infinite amount of time, but…
-Stealing is when B picks up the property of A and A doesn’t have it anymore.
-Piracy is about hijacking of ships.
-What you’re talking about is counterfeiting (making an illegal copy of something protected by copyright), even though this word is not as fancy and does not have the same emotional impact, making it harder to justify some laws.
Edited 2011-05-13 19:41 UTC
Well, counterfeiting is often related to trademark infringement, so let’s just call it copyright infringement to avoid ambiguity
You have a point
Yes, because we really should crack down on people making watches that look like rolexes. I mean, most of the third world can’t even tell time, so why do they need a watch. If they can’t live by our rules, screw them.
If really you wanted to stop counterfeits being sold you would probably select Ebay as the first site to close. There is no possibility of this occcurring because Ebay has a very cosy relationship with congress.
The counterfeiting websites at least have the decency to tell you their goods are inexpensive replicas. The poor suckers on Ebay frequently get to buy expensive “100% authentic with box and tags” counterfeit clothing, accessories and jewelry.
In the case of memory cards and USB sticks you would be very hard pressed to even find a genuine one for sale on Ebay.
Edited 2011-05-13 23:43 UTC
Really? Good luck.
What the founding fathers actually had in mind was this :
http://www.despair.com/misfortunate.html
Getting old, I admit, but it’s still amazing to imagine that this could be granted.